The Language of Metal
I have the benefit of living in America. Yeah, that sounds really pretentious but seriously, despite our failing economy we are a powerful country. I am not just talking about politically or…*cough* financially but rather culturally. In our information age every country can talk with every other and that means cultures can affect one another. Many teenagers in other countries are quite enamored with American culture. It always helps that many countries worldwide have put the English language into schools so that even in the frigid north’s of Russia, Sweden and Finland we have people that can converse in the new sage Saxon tongue.
Nowhere is this influence of language more apparent then in metal music. Yeah sure, other genres of music use the language worldwide as well but, metal is a far more world traveled genre that shares many consistencies among its varying bands.
I often wonder what has caused many of these bands to write in English. Is it America’s massive influence or is it perchance the influence of a tiny island that ruled the world at one point. Great Britain was the nexus for the conception of heavy metal music. The bands Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Venom and Motorhead all originated on it’s rocky shores and their influences are still very much felt to this day. Usually when you try to imitate your bands favorite style you try to copy the language too. I am no linguist like the famed fantasy author Tolkein but, what I do know is that every language has a certain sound when spoken. Maybe the way that many of the songs screamed of glory, depression, war, mythology and metal spoke to someone in distant Bombay that had never heard that tongue before. Then they associate English with being the “metal tongue”. This is probably why we have the broken English songs of many jump start Italian power metal bands. I remember reading the liner notes thinking to myself, “they really don’t know what these words men, do they?”
As can be seen, every major band worldwide uses English. Even the kvlt northern black metalers who shun all use English. However, some of the truly hardcore acts out there sing in their native language or, even more bizarre, a language that is not of their own and not English. There are a few bands that I can use as an example of this and I shall chose 3 that each have a different spin on things.
First is the Canadian band Liva. This is a band that lives in French Canada but sing in neither French nor English. They sing in the dead language known as Latin. Latin is a fascinating tongue by which many others are based (Spanish, French, Italian etc). Even in English many route words are from Latin and almost all of our scientific terminology is Latin. The choice to sing in Latin is no doubt very deliberate and it is possibly because many of their lyrical themes are Christian based. The original Christian text being written in a form of Latin, it is only semi-logical that they would try to create an all encompassing effect by using the old language to speak for their music.
The next band hails from the cold north and sings about trolls. Finntroll is an odd band that is of the folk metal variety. They are Finnish but, many of their earlier albums are written in the Swedish tongue, or a type of Swedish dialectic rather. This was due to the fact that one of the original singers of the band was from a small sect in Finland where they spoke Swedish. It then transferred to their music. Maybe not from artistic choice but, it certainly does add some uniqueness to mix Finnish style music and Swedish language.
The last band is a bit newer and comes from the Faroe Islands that are far off the northern coast of Great Britain and off the west coast of Norway. From this seemingly tiny island in the middle of nowhere, the metal band Tyr pumps out their own brand of Viking Metal. They use Faroe based folk music as the blue prints and combine it with progressive heavy metal variations and clean singing to give you music with quite the interesting flavor. Their original work is mainly in English with a few songs here and there done in their native Faroe tongue. However, with the release of their latest effort, Land, they went for it all and recorded all but two songs in Faroe. This is a risky move for a band that has had such worldwide appeal. Many fans like to sing-a-long to songs and this might hinder that chance being that they don’t understand how to pronounce certain words. Still this is a band that takes great pride in their heritage and I applaud their desire to let understanding dampen the meaning of their music.
Sending their music worldwide with their latest effort…
As you can see metal music worldwide uses all sorts of language, mainly English, in their translation of all things epic, deadly and passionate. Even if we can’t understand the words, we understand that guitar and the double bass pedal action. It signals us to throw up the horns, bang our head and scream glorious rage for metal fucking rules.